A. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to network application servers, and more particularly, to security software used to protect network servers.
B. Description of Related Art
Network servers, such as computers that transmit HTML (HyperText Markup Language) documents to client computing devices on the Internet, may interact and receive data requests from many different end-users. These servers, which may receive and respond to the end-user requests, are commonly called web servers.
At a basic level, web servers provide static web pages to end-users by forwarding requested files to the end-users. At a more advanced level, web servers may respond to user input and generate dynamic web pages for the user based on the user input. Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard protocol through which a web server passes a user's request to an application program. The application processes the user's request and transmits information to the web server for forwarding back to the user.
Web servers are frequently targets for attacks from malicious end-users. The end-user may wish to disable the web-server, to gain control of the web server, or to access information on the web server that would not normally be accessible to the end-user. One type of attack involves sending long requests or a large number of requests to the web server in an attempt to cause a web server error, such as a buffer overflow condition. Such web server error conditions may compromise the security of the web server.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for increasing the reliability of web servers and their resistance to malicious attacks.